Mega-Zine & VR - A Retrospective (Part 1)

With the demise of 'zine coming closer by the day, I think it's a good idea to look back and think about the whole 'zine story and where we go from here. There are many embarrassing tales, and we all acted like people we would later learn to hate - but this is a warts and all story.

I'm not much of a writer, and my memory is notoriously bad - So perhaps I'm not the best person to write this... However, I'm sure people can fill in the blanks once it gets going. Of course, this is just my perspective on it. Thank heavens for archive.org - otherwise I'd never have remembered the dates, or what the sites looked like.


My 'zine story begins in the summer of 2000. Reading the letters of R. Dwarf, and Ford - Thinking to myself "what a bunch of pretentious, inane tossers". I made a point of reading every day and laughing at the silly people. Skip forward 9 months, and as changed person I start reading again. This time I understand and identify with these people. I feverishly start writing letters, and after a month of writing almost every day, faxing money, and posting Jaffa Cakes. I give up hope of ever getting printed.

August 2001 I got my first computer with external 56k dial up modem. Years later Darren would blow up this historic modem saying "I plugged it in, and it smelled of burning". Once online, the second thing I look for is 'zine, and I stumble upon the original Vegetable Revolution on Yahoo Groups. I join up, start posting, and make a few virtual friends.

The original VR was setup in March 2001 by Fee + Emma, using a WebTV box, and a Library computer. During it's run would become one of the biggest groups on Yahoo, and the biggest in the "weirdos" category. Officially confirming us as the biggest group of weirdos in the world. We'd spend hours chatting through the clunky interface at yahoo, talking of Lemon Fanta and Jaffa Cakes. One day the great WLW posted, and we debated for weeks if it was the real deal. The consensus being that it was, and we realised we'd made a dent in the universe.

In January 2002 a meetup in Manchester was arranged. There had been one before, but it was before I joined. 16 year olds across the country lied to their parents ("Of course I'm not meeting people I met on the internet, do I look like I'm stupid??? Gaaaawd, you are SO unfair. I HATE you!!!!") - And spent the day hanging around Manchester City Centre doing rebellious teenage things, like writing on benches.

This is where the idea of a "proper" VegRev website was conceived. Yahoo was often slow or offline, days went by where we couldn't get on VR. So I blagged Fee that I was an internet expert, and she agreed to lend the VR name to an official, non-yahoo based website. That night I furiously Googled "how to make a website", and came across YaBB. I'd only had the most basic training in website design at college using a program called "HoTMetaL". (Producing a truly stunning site) - So all the programming stuff that came with YaBB was a mystery to me.


Eventually I figured it out, and at 10:00pm, March 27th 2002 The Vegetable Revolution 1.5 went live. And it looked a little something like this:






Part 2 Coming Soon. Please post up your memories of 'zine and the early days of VR. And maybe we can get a nice complete picture of things.